Billy Bellew : a novel

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CHAPTER PAGE

I. FOREIGN SERVICE • -I

H. WINIFRED FORBES - - - • "14

Chapter I. Foreign Service

One bitter January afternoon Billy Bellew, striding along at his accustomed high rate of speed through the fog and darkness of St. James's Street, reached the door of his club, which he had no sooner flung open than he was greeted by a little knot of friends, who had encountered one another a few minutes previously in the hall of that establishment.

' Hullo, Billy,' called out one of them, ' frozen out, like the rest of us, eh ?'

' Rather !' answered the young man addressed, unbuttoning his fur-lined coat and rubbing his hands as he approached the group. ' I've been rapping that beastly old barometer for four days ; but he said he didn't mean going down yet awhile, so I thought I had better come up. Do the theatres and give one's horses a rest, you know. After all, we've had a pretty good time of it, so far. I always think one gets the best of the hunting before Christmas.'

'Well, that's a cheerful view to take of the subject,' remarked the first speaker ; ' but I can't say I agree with you. Personally, I don't care about riding over a blind country, and I'm a bit too old now to appreciate the pleasure of getting up in the dark. I haven't had a dozen days with the hounds yet, and Lord knows whether I shall get a dozen before I have to send my horses up to Tattersall's. It don't look like it at present.'

'Oh, you'll be all right,' returned Billy confidently ; ' don't you worry yourself. A week of frost, or even a fortnight, isn't such a bad thing, when it comes at the right time.'

' I like your easy-going way of calling January the right time,' ejaculated a melancholy-looking little man, whose hands were thrust deep into the pockets of his overcoat, and whose hat was rammed down over his eyes. ' It may be right enough for you lazy beggars ; but I'll be hanged if it's right for a poor devil of an M.P. I've got to begin work early next month, or my constituents will want to know the reason why. And it isn't going to freeze for a week or a fortnight ; it's going to freeze for six weeks straight on end : it always does. I'll tell you what it is : I'm a devilish patient fellow, and I can stand a lot ; but really and truly this isn't good enough. I shall get influenza and be ordered off to the Kiviera — that's what I shall do.'

' Oh, I wouldn't do that /' said Billy, in a tone of shocked remonstrance. ' Of course it must be an abominable nuisance for you to have to sit and listen, day after day, to a lot of jabbering duffers, and I can't think why you go in for that sort of thing. But I suppose you have your reasons ; and, after all, you ought to be able to manage a run down into the country once a week. It isn't much ; still, it's better than nothing. Better than kicking your heels at Nice or Cannes, or some such beastly hole, anyhow.'

The disconsolate legislator shook his head and refused to be comforted. He said he might as well give up hunting at once, and he believed he would give it up. He added that, if there was one character more obnoxious to him than another, it was that of the prosperous, unsympathetic brute who insisted upon making the best of his neighbours' misfortunes. Finally he dug Billy viciously in the ribs with his umbrella and wandered off towards the smoking-room, whither he was presently followed by the other malcontents, each of whom had his own particular tale of woe to narrate before departing.

The prosperous and unsympathetic brute did not accompany them; he found, on glancing at the clock, that there would hardly be time. He made a sort of conditional promise to dine in company with two of them and ' go on somewhere afterwards,' but he was careful to impress upon them that they mustn't wait for him, because he couldn't be quite sure yet what his engagements might be :

whereat they exchanged meaning smiles. So he marched off into the darkness again, a tall, wellknit figure ; and as the feeble glimmer of the gaslamps fell upon him, the passers-by were privileged to behold for an instant a face which in point of beauty could, perhaps, hardly have been matched in London or out of it. For Billy Bellew, with his black hair, his violet eyes and his perfectly moulded features, might almost have posed as a model for a somewhat robust Apollo. He was clean-shaven, after the modern fashion, but his mouth was so well shaped and his upper-lip was so short that the modern fashion was by no means as unbecoming to him as it is to most men of his complexion.

' Poor old Billy !' remarked one of the friends whom he left behind him ; ' it's easy to guess what has brought him up to London, and why he looks so confoundedly hilarious over it.'

'He always looks hilarious,' said the other; 'it's his little way — just as it's your little way to look sulky. Splendid digestion, I suppose. It's simply inconceivable that he can have remained in love all this time with that yellow-haired, underbred woman, who is ten years older than he is, if she's a day.'

Most of us believe in quite a large number of inconceivable things, such as eternity and unlimited space, so that we ought to find no difficulty whatsoever in grasping the idea that a well-to-do, well-connected and strikingly handsome young man may fall in love and remain in love with an underbred woman who dyes her hair and is his senior by a decade or thereabouts. As a matter of fact, poor Billy had fallen in love with a lady answering to that description ; and if he had not remained in love with her for two years, he honestly thought that he had. He would, indeed, have been terribly ashamed of himself had he admitted a doubt upon the subject into his mind ; although, seeing that the lady in question was a married lady, it may be deemed by some that his constancy was no legitimate matter for pride. But, then, the amazing innocence of Billy Bellew would doubtless be a more difficult conception to some people than eternity or infinite space.

He walked for a short distance along Piccadilly, and then hailed a passing hansom, which took him to a house in Lowndes Street, where he ascertained, on inquiry, that Mrs. Littlewood was at home. Presently he was ushered into one of those drawingrooms, encumbered by screens and drapery and flowering plants and little tables adorned with old silver knick-knacks, which would be really pretty if they had not of late years acquired a certain vulgarity of association ; and he was greeted, on his entrance, by a lady who would also have been really pretty, if late years had not produced the effect upon her which years inevitably produce and which art is powerless to conceal. Mrs. Littlewood's hair had once been golden ; but it had never been (because nobody's ever is) of the colour which it now claimed as its own, nor had she always exhibited to the disrespectful wonder of the world her present impossible complexion. However, her china-blue eyes and her girlish figure remained to her: besides which, she dressed admirably and had very small hands and feet. She started up from her low chair by the fireside, exclaiming :

' So here you are at last ! I began to think that your telegram was a humbug, and that you had gone in for skating, now that the hunting is Btopped.'

' Am I late ?' asked the young man, consulting his watch and the clock on the mantelpiece. ' I'm awfully sorry if I am ; but I just looked in at the club for a minute or two, and those fellows kept me, jawing away about the weather and one thing and another. Well, and how have you been getting on all this long time ?'

He dropped into a chair and rubbed his hands, gazing smilingly at his opposite neighbour, who responded by a shrug of her shoulders and a grimace.

' I have been getting on so badly,' she answered, ' that the doctor tells me I must be getting off. I suppose, as you have never made a single allusion to it in your letters, you paid no attention to what I told you about my having had a horrid cold, which has settled on my chest ; but the truth is that I have been wretchedly seedy, and we are going to spend the rest of the winter in Algiers. I am thankful to say that we have let the house ; so it is possible for us to obey the doctor's orders.'

Mr. Bellew endeavoured to say what was kind and sympathetic : it was not his fault if experience had taught him how little cause there was for alarm in Mrs. Littlewood's transient ailments. But he rather clumsily forgot to express the dismay which he ought to have felt at the news of her impending departure from England.

' Oh, you don't care !' she returned pettishly ; ' it will be all the same to you if I leave my bones in that outlandish place. As far as that goes, I shan't much care either — there are many worse things than death. What I do dread is the prospect of four or five months' tete-a-tete life with Alfred. You know what my life with him is !'

' Oh yes,' murmured Billy, shaking his head sorrowfully.

Not that he did know ; but he knew what she had told him, and he also knew that Colonel Littlewood was a singularly despicable person. After a pause, she resumed :

' I think you might come out, too, Billy. You can't say that I am ever selfish with you, and I haven't attempted to drag you away from your beloved hunting since it began ; but now that the frost has set in, it wouldn't be such a very great sacrifice to you to come abroad with us, and it would make all the difference to me. You could take up your quarters in a hotel near us, you know ; I won't even suggest that you should share our villa, because I am well aware of the tremendous importance that you attach to gossip- Billy tried hard not to look aghast, and failed signally. Not such a very great sacrifice to leave England in the middle of the hunting season, and dawdle through interminable weeks of enforced idleness upon the shores of North Africa? Good Lord ! But he only thought this, he did not say it; for in his own way he was something of a hero ; and that wretched little woman knew full well how much heroism was implied in his cheerful rejoinder of :

' All right : I'll manage it. Only I shall want a little time to make arrangements and get rid of the horses and all that, you see. I'll follow you out in a week or so. You're off at once, I suppose ?'

Mrs. Littlewood's nature was too essentially feminine to be magnanimous, and she had had too lengthy an experience of the slippery ways of men to run unnecessary risks. She said :

' We don't start until next Monday. You can easily make all the arrangements that you want to make before then, and I do hope you will travel with us. Alfred never thinks of anybody but himself, and doesn't even know how to take care of himself when he is removed from his ordinary surroundings. I really don't feel strong enough just now to look after him.'

She was, however, strong enough, it appeared, to go to the theatre that night, and she had taken a ticket for Billy, whom she expected to escort her.

He therefore gave up all idea of dining at the club, and, having signified his willingness to accompany the travellers on the following Monday, went away to change his clothes. As he was leaving the house, he encountered a dapper little red-faced personage, with small, twinkling eyes and a grayish moustache, who said :

' Hullo, old man ! Been arranging matters with the wife ? Devil of a nuisance, this fancy of hers for going abroad, ain't it? But you're going to join the party, I hope? You are, are you? That's all right ! And we shall see you at dinner, shall we? That's all right !'

From the very beginning of the business — which now seemed such a long, long time ago — Colonel Littlewood had thought, or had affected to think, that it was all right. He was perhaps a bad husband ; he certainly was not an affectionate one ; he was a confirmed tippler ; he had on various occasions borrowed money from his wife's friend, whom he invariably treated as a personal friend of his own and welcomed to his house at all times and seasons. He had persistently ignored rumours which could scarcely have failed to reach his ears. It was difficult to speak civilly to the man, and impossible to help despising him ; yet it did not seem quite so certain as it ought to have seemed that some of those who despised him were less contemptible than he.

This was the unwelcome reflection which thrust itself upon Billy Bellew as he strode, with bent head, along the filthy, slippery London pavement. It was true that he had done Colonel Littlewood no injury of which the law can take cognisance ; but he had unquestionably done Mrs. Littlewood the injury of compromising her, and he had also (though that was a minor consideration) done a good deal of injury to himself. He had, in short, behaved like a fool. There was no blinking the matter ; and, as he no longer attempted to blink it in his self-communings, it will be perceived that he was no longer in love. Nevertheless, he had once been in love with the woman who had first flirted with him, then made him her confidant, and had finally given him to understand that, had it been possible for her to begin her life over again, she would have chosen him out of all the world as her husband. As he was still fond of her, he still believed in her, and he still pitied her from the bottom of his heart. Only he sometimes wished that she could bring herself to face the necessity of submission to hard facts ; he sometimes wished that she were a little less reckless and indifferent to public opinion ; and sometimes (but that was an idea upon which he hastened to turn his back) he half suspected her of being a trifle selfish. For the rest, any man who had dared to breathe a word against Mrs. Littlewood's fair fame in the presence of Billy Bellew would have been a sadly battered and disfigured man within a few minutes after the utterance of his shameful calumny.

Unfortunately, one cannot blacken the eyes of

FOREIGN SERVICE u

ladies or knock their teeth down their throats ; so calumnies had been uttered, and it had been impossible to take any notice of them. And now he was going to Algiers with the Littlewoods ; and everybody would hear of it ; and he would have to sell his horses in a hurry ; and he didn't know what on earth to do with himself out there ; and he wished he had never been born !

The above irritated soliloquy might naturally enough be taken as portending that the end of a foolish entanglement was in sight ; but anyone who had been aware of that soliloquy and had arrived at that natural conclusion would have been imperfectly acquainted with the character of Billy Bellew. Such, indeed, was Billy's own case; for he had never thought his character worthy of close inspection, and had never supposed that he differed in any essential particular from the rest of the world. He did differ from the great majority in one particular, namely, that he was absolutely unselfish. There are a few people like that, but only a few, and most of them are old maids. Everything pointed to the probability that Billy would remain an old bachelor ; because he would have submitted to any personal inconvenience rather than cause Blanche Littlewood one moment of additional distress, and it was certain that Blanche Littlewood would have been infinitely distressed by the loss of his allegiance.

So it came to pass that, in the early morning of one of those divine winter days which our Northern summer can only at rare intervals contrive to rival, three passengers from Marseilles disembarked upon the modern quay beneath the white and glittering old city of pirates. Two of them had been sea-sick and were cross ; the third, upon whom had devolved all previous trouble and responsibility during their joint journey, was in his accustomed condition of equanimity, and was able to derive such enjoyment from the novelty of the scene as an uneducated sense of form and colour brought within the range of his capacities. He dispersed the vociferous Arabs; he obtained possession of the luggage, after a delay of which Mrs. Littlewood complained querulously ; he chartered a conveyance, and, as a matter of course, he drove up to the suburb of Mustapha Superieur with his companions to see them comfortably established in their villa before securing a resting-place for himself.

' This is very jolly — awfully pretty, and unlike anything one has ever seen before, and — and that sort of thing, you know,' was the comment upon the scenery which suggested itself to him while the little horses toiled up the dusty road towards that quarter which wealthy and invalid Anglo-Saxons have marked for their own.

Colonel Littlewood said rather snappishly, ' Oh, I dare say it's all right ;' and Mrs. Littlewood remarked that paradise itself would hardly be worth gaining at the cost of so horrible a voyage. She added that she was quite sure the servants, who had been despatched by a previous steamer, would not have taken the trouble to put anything straight.

This gloomy foreboding was, unhappily, verified. The villa which Colonel Littlewood had taken, in obedience to his wife's behests, was a very charming house, built in the pseudo-Moorish style by an enlightened architect, surrounded by a prettily laidout garden and commanding a view of the bay and the snowy Djurdjura Mountains beyond, which in itself justified the high rent demanded by the proprietor ; but breakfast was not ready, and the baths had not been unpacked, and Mr. Bellew had to perform many menial offices before he was released, without a word of thanks.

' Upon my word, Blanche, you do make that poor devil work like a slave!' exclaimed the Colonel, with a touch of compunction, after Billy had departed for the Hotel d'Orient.

' Oh, he likes it, and it's good for him,' returned Mrs. Littlewood lightly.

It may have been good for him ; but it was an exaggeration to affirm that he liked it. However, as has already been intimated, he was one of the most good-natured of men, and he was irresistibly impelled by his temperament to make the best of things, even when things did not look particularly bright. Youth and redundant health are scarcely compatible with melancholy. It had been a trial to give up the hunting ; but that trial was now over and done with ; and the blue sky, and the white houses, and the sunny slopes, and the palm-trees,

T4 BILLY BELLE W

and the feathery bamboos, were pleasant to the eye.

' I expect one will manage to pull through somehow,' said Billy to himself in cheerful accents when he reached the suburban hostelry where a couple of rooms had been engaged for him by telegraph.

Chapter II. Winifred Forbes

The town of Algiers faces east, and the wooded elopes which trend upwards around and above it are thickly sprinkled with whitewashed villas, looking for the most part towards the same quarter or a point or two northwards thereof. In old days the inhabitants of the town naturally wished to keep their country houses as cool as possible, and the winter visitors who have supplanted them must needs make the best of narrow windows and an insufficient supply of sunshine. The winter visitors, however, are gradually straggling further and further away from the district known as Mustapha Superieur; so that some of them have already overtopped the ridge which used to be considered its utmost limit, and, turning their backs upon the town and the bay, gaze due south across the wide Metidja Plain. If they thus deprive themselves of a charming and varied prospect, they acquire what is perhaps of more practical importance to them, the privilege of basking in the sun's rays until the Angelus-bell rings and the brief twilight gives place to darkness. Not that the view of the Metidja and the Atlas Mountains is wanting in space or beauty of outline or exquisite soft gradations of tint. It lacks the Mediterranean ; but if the Mediterranean were not within reach, it would satisfy most people.

It amply satisfied the soul of Miss Winifred Forbes, who sat in the little arbour at the end of the garden one morning, looking out upon a scene with which she was becoming familiarized by degrees, but which it seemed to her impossible that she could ever learn to accept as an everyday background to existence, like the view from the library windows at home in Shropshire. From a point almost directly beneath her feet the hillside fell away in abrupt declivities of uncultivated ground, where the palmetto and the asphodel grew and flourished amongst the rocks ; immediately opposite were slopes, clothed with vineyards — a comparatively recent and scarcely a satisfactory feature in the landscape ; beyond stretched the vast plain, with its orange - groves, its cornfields and its scattered habitations, and in the distance rose range after range of purple hills, fading into shadowy outlines against a sky of unclouded blue. She was not of a poetic or romantic temperament ; at least, if she was, she had been too busy all her life to cultivate any natural tendency in that direction ; but scenery and sunlight made her happy and appealed to her, as, indeed, they do and must to nine out of every ten human beings ; and, since nothing is more becoming than happiness to the average human being, it may be said without flattery of Miss Forbes that, as she sat contentedly there in her clean pink cotton gown, she was an agreeable object for the eye to rest upon.

Her mother, a dispassionate judge, was wont to say, ' Winnie isn't exactly pretty — of course, nothing like as pretty as Daisy ; but she always looks nice, and she has a clear, healthy skin.' Strictly speaking, her complexion did no doubt constitute her sole valid claim to beauty, although she had a pair of soft brown eyes which were wonderfully expressive at times, and which never expressed ill-will to man, woman, or child. But the rest of her features were not much to boast of, and she was too tall, too thin, too angular, to meet the requirements of any artistic standard. Nevertheless, it was universally and quite justly admitted that she ' looked nice.' Probably she was such a good girl that she could not have helped looking nice, even though fewer physical advantages had been vouchsafed to her.

One knows, from having seen so many examples of it, what invariably happens to a good girl who is the eldest of her family, who has a younger sister better-looking than herself, and whose parents do not happen to be energetic persons. Ever since she had reached years of discretion Winifred had been at once the providence and the maid-of-allwork of the Forbes household. It was she who engaged and dismissed the servants, ordered the dinner, scolded the cook, took the railway tickets and looked after the luggage ; it was she who copied out manuscripts and corrected proofs for her erudite and inefficient father, a country gentleman with an odd mania for scribbling upon historical and political topics ; it was she who supervised Daisy's wardrobe and subsidised that extravagant young woman with occasional doles out of her own not very liberal allowance ; above all, it was upon her shoulders that the responsibility of seeing that Micky did not get his feet wet or overtire himself, or otherwise endanger his health, had, by common consent, been placed. Now, as Micky was a boy of fourteen, as he held decided views with respect to the right of every freeborn Briton to personal liberty, and as it was on his account that the Forbeses had been packed off South for the winter by their medical adviser, it will be seen that the task of keeping her young brother in a state of discipline and submission was not the easiest of those which Winifred was expected to discharge.

Presently he sauntered out of the house behind her, with his hands in his pockets, and, making his way across a somewhat untidy garden, which, in spite of neglect, was gay with tea-roses and geraniums and giant cinerarias, threw himself down upon the bench by his sister's side. He was tall for his age, but not as broad across the chest as his relations would have liked him to be, and the colour on his cheeks was rather too vivid to be a sign of health. For the rest, he promised to develop into a tolerably good-looking man, notwithstanding his short, turned-up nose, and his reddishbrown hair and eyes were much admired in the family.

' Winnie, my love,' he began, ' it is with sincere regret that I have to inform you of my inability to pursue my ordinary course of study this morning.'

Winifred did not rebuke him for the above disrespectful imitation of his father's accustomed tone and phraseology, because she knew by experience that remonstrances upon such points were seldom of much avail ; she only shook her head, and said quietly :

'I can't give you another holiday, Micky. If you don't do your lessons now, you will be sorry for it when you go back to school and find yourself placed among the infants. After all, you must admit that you haven't been very hard worked since we came here.'

' I cheerfully make that admission, my love, and I feel the full force of your remarks. At the same time, it will be obvious to you that I cannot do my lessons in the absence of my kind preceptress, and my kind preceptress will be unavoidably absent this morning. Shortly before twelve o'clock, my love, you will put on your Sunday clothes and go out into society with your papa and mamma. Lady Ottery — may her shadow never be less ! — has sent to beg that they will bring one of their charming daughters with them to her breakfast-party, and the lot has fallen upon you. It seems that a stray man has turned up, and a stray woman is wanted to match him.'

'But why isn't Daisy going?' asked Winifred, raising her eyebrows a little.

' Daisy has been approached upon the subject, and has declined. She said she would see the whole lot of them jolly well blowed first — or words to that effect. I am afraid our dear Daisy got out of bed the wrong side to-day — though it is not for me to complain. And I must say I should think a breakfast-party was a rather ghastly sort of entertainment.'

Perhaps Miss Forbes may have thought so too ; but it would never have occurred to her that personal disinclination to take part in an entertainment could be any excuse for shirking it ; and, as a matter of fact, breakfast-parties are not quite so objectionable abroad as they would be in England. English sojourners in Algiers and other Southern watering-places have, at all events, assimilated the foreign custom in that respect, contenting themselves with a cup of coffee and a roll at nine o'clock, and being prepared for social intercourse at an hour when, if they were at home, they would very properly refuse to see anybody. Lord and Lady Ottery, who occupied a villa of imposing dimensions, had invited no less than twenty people to share their mid-day meal that morning, and were now destined to provide food for twenty-two, including Winifred Forbes and the stray man of whom mention has been made.

The former hastened to array herself in what her brother, with masculine ignorance, had described as her 'Sunday clothes'; but she had several small jobs to attend to before starting, so that she vexed her father by keeping him waiting nearly three minutes. "When she had seated herself, with her back to the horses, in the little open carriage which had been hired for the winter, Mr. Forbe3 — a tall, spare, nervous-looking old man, whose long gray hair fell over his coat-collar, and whose convex spectacles nearly hid the weak eyes behind them — thought it right to utter a mild remonstrance.